John Corcoran is a recovering attorney, an author, and a former White House writer and speechwriter to the Governor of California. Throughout his career, John has worked in Hollywood, the heart of Silicon Valley, and ran his boutique law firm in the San Francisco Bay Area, catering to small business owners and entrepreneurs.
Since 2012, John has been the host of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where he has interviewed hundreds of CEOs, founders, authors, and entrepreneurs, including Peter Diamandis, Adam Grant, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Marie Forleo.
John is also the Co-founder of Rise25, a company that connects B2B businesses with their ideal clients, referral partners, and strategic partners. They help their clients generate ROI through their done-for-you podcast service.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [01:53] John Corcoran explains why The Automatic Customer is a must-read for entrepreneurs
- [03:15] Key takeaways from The Automatic Customer for building predictable revenue
- [06:24] Why Perplexity AI is making waves in tech today
- [08:53] How AI tools solve specific problems, from customizing text to automating complex tasks
- [13:56] Why B2B businesses struggle without consistent content marketing strategies
- [16:04] The value of podcasts as a versatile tool for nurturing relationships
- [17:13] Ami Kassar’s exemplary work ethic and its lessons for entrepreneurs
In this episode…
Many B2B businesses struggle with inconsistent revenue, limited client acquisition, and the inability to keep up in a content-driven economy. Static websites, outdated marketing approaches, and a lack of predictable income models leave companies feeling stuck in a cycle of uncertainty. How can organizations break free from this cycle and achieve sustainable growth in today’s dynamic market?
John Corcoran shares practical strategies to address these challenges, emphasizing the importance of content marketing and subscription-based revenue models. Drawing from insights in The Automatic Customer by John Warrillow, John explains how businesses can build predictable income streams by offering specialized, ongoing services. He also highlights how tools like Perplexity AI can streamline tasks such as customizing communication, automating contracts, and tailoring resumes, helping businesses save time and improve efficiency. John stresses that creating and repurposing content, especially through podcasts, can nurture relationships, establish authority, and drive growth.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as Chad Franzen interviews John Corcoran, Co-founder of Rise25, about leveraging AI tools and strategic content marketing. John explains why podcasts are a cornerstone of effective marketing, shares examples of AI-powered solutions, and highlights the common pitfalls B2B companies face when neglecting content creation. Through these insights, you will learn innovative strategies to transform your business business practices.
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
Special Mention(s)
- The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry by John Warrillow
- Perplexity AI
- Ami Kassar On LinkedIn
- EO Philadelphia
Quotable Moments:
- “Content is the new fuel of the new economy, and if you’re not creating it, you’re falling behind.”
- “You could have built and nurtured so many relationships by engaging in content marketing.”
- “It’s not just me delivering a service — a much bigger team delivers a better experience.”
- “AI today can create customized resumes that yield better job opportunities.”
- “The more predictable and consistent revenue for a business allows it to reinvest and deliver a better customer experience.”
Action Steps:
- Explore subscription models: Consider integrating a subscription-based model into your business to achieve more predictable revenue. This approach addresses the challenge of inconsistent cash flow, as discussed in the episode, and allows companies to reinvest and improve customer experience.
- Utilize AI tools for efficiency: Experiment with advanced AI tools like Perplexity AI to handle specific tasks such as generating tailored content or solving detailed queries. This can help overcome the challenge of time-consuming and monotonous tasks, enabling you to focus more on strategic initiatives.
- Engage in consistent content marketing: Create and distribute content regularly through various channels to maintain visibility and nurture relationships with clients and partners. This addresses the issue of static online presence and helps businesses stay relevant in a rapidly changing market.
- Leverage networks and communities: Participate actively in professional and online communities to share insights and support other business leaders. This approach, as exemplified by Ami Kassar, can lead to reciprocal relationships that benefit personal and organizational growth.
- Delegate and document processes: Focus on documenting business processes and delegating tasks to specialized team members to improve efficiency and service delivery. This strategy helps overcome the bottleneck of having all tasks reliant on one individual, allowing for more scalable and effective operations.
Sponsor: Rise25
At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 100 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution.
We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work.
What do you need to start a podcast?
When you use our proven system, all you need is an idea and a voice. We handle the strategy, production, and distribution – you just need to show up and talk.
The Rise25 podcasting solution is designed to help you build a profitable podcast. This requires a specific strategy, and we’ve got that down pat. We focus on making sure you have a direct path to ROI, which is the most important component. Plus, our podcast production company takes any heavy lifting of production and distribution off your plate.
We make distribution easy
We’ll distribute each episode across more than 11 unique channels, including iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. We’ll also create a copy for each episode and promote your show across social media.
Cofounders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars, YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk, and many more.
The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.
Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships.
Are you considering launching a podcast to acquire partnerships, clients, and referrals? Would you like to work with a podcast agency that wants you to win?
Contact us now at [email protected] or book a call at rise25.com/bookcall.
Rise25 Cofounders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.
Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
All right. Today we’re talking about my favorite AI tool, which I love, a book recommendation. And the number one mistake that B2B businesses make today. My guest today, the guest interviewer, is Chad Franzen who’s going to be interviewing me. So stay tuned.
Intro: 00:17
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:34
All right. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran, here I am, the host of the show. Hopefully, you’ve listened before. And you know that every week we have interesting CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs of companies from Netflix to Grubhub, Redfin, gusto, Kinko’s, YPO, EO; check out the archives. Lots of great episodes for you to check out there.
And of course, this company or this episode brought to you by our company, Rise25, where we help B2B businesses to get clients referrals and strategic partnerships with Done-For-You podcast and content marketing, and you can learn more about what we do in our new platform. Podcast Copilot at Rise25.com. Or you can email our team in [email protected], and my guest here today is actually going to be interviewing me. Chad Franzen is his name.
You’ve heard him before on this show and he’s reappearance because we’re going to be talking about a couple of specific topics affecting our industry, industry and recommendations. So, Chad, take it away.
Chad Franzen: 01:28
Yeah. Hey, thanks, John. Great to be here with you today. As you mentioned, we’re going to be talking about a recent book that has influenced you a lot. A piece of software or a tool that you recommend.
In this case it will be AI software, a person who has influenced you, that’s in your network, and an issue that is kind of relevant in your industry. So why don’t we start with the book? What book maybe is one that you would recommend that you’ve read recently?
John Corcoran: 01:53
Yeah. So I’ve one that I went back to is actually this book is about nine years old, I believe it’s called The Automatic Customer by John Warrillow, who’s written a number of different books, including Built to Sell, but this one was a book that he did that was about how almost any company, he’d probably say any company can turn into use a subscription model and the benefits of doing that. So he talked about, you know, how there are many companies he takes, like, you know, like a, like a handyman type of business where they’re really unreliable income. They’re going from job to job. One month might be great, the next month is horrible.
And then he talks about how they can niche down, find something that they’re really good at, get really specialized in that, and then provide that as an ongoing service. Maybe it’s a maintenance package that he sells to all of his clients, and then that gives a more predictable revenue for the business and allows the business to reinvest deliver a better experience for the customer. So kind of all the different benefits of it. So I had read it before I’d interviewed John before, but I went back to it and I, you know, it had some great ideas that really have stood the test of time. You know, 8 or 9 years after it came out, as.
Chad Franzen: 03:09
You read through that book, was there kind of like a moment, like a ding, ding, ding? This really applies to me.
John Corcoran: 03:15
There are so many, you know, because I remember the struggle of being a practicing attorney, which is not that different from being that proverbial handyman who’s going from job to job. It’s just, you know, you’ve got an advanced degree and, you know, but you’re kind of the same thing. You’re waiting for customers to come in the door or clients to come in the door. And some months were wonderful and other months that were just crickets. And so back then, I remember trying to figure out, how do I turn this into something that’s more predictable, more consistent, where I could really specialize, where I could hire, where I could get myself out of the way, I could build more of a team.
And I tried a lot of different things. I wish I’d had that roadmap of the automatic customer at that time, and it took a lot of years of trying different things to get to the point where now it’s a very different business that I’m involved in that I’m running, but it is a lot more predictable. Consistent. We have a specialization, we have a much bigger team. It’s not just me delivering a service.
So for sure, there are definitely a lot of different insights that helped with that.
Chad Franzen: 04:25
Yeah, right. 25 clients, you know, pay. They’re basically subscribers, I mean, for lack of a better word, are some of the tenets that we use here at Rise25. Based on what you read in that book, the automatic customer.
John Corcoran: 04:36
Oh, definitely. Yeah. You know, I read it originally when it came out and there were a lot of different ideas from it that I incorporated into the work that we do now. But, you know, when the rubber meets the road, it’s still hard. And I see this with a lot of businesses as well, where they really struggle to get themselves out of delivery.
They struggle to get the things that are in. Their head down onto paper to document their processes, to then give it to someone else. There’s a lot of imposter syndrome. There’s a lot of, you know, insecurities that come up around that. People worrying about, oh, is the client going to like, you know, want to continue to work with us if they were hiring me.
You know, all those things kind of get in the way. What I’ve discovered, though, is that the end experience that we deliver now as a company, compared to the end experience that I delivered 15 years ago as a practicing attorney with no one working for me and basically just a bookkeeper, maybe some eventually some contract attorneys, the end experience is so much better with a much bigger team than it ever was when I was touching everything. And that’s because you can get different people, you know, like yourself, Chad, who specialize, who, who are really good at the thing that they do, and you can document different processes. And then, you know me, I can float above it all and I can kind of look at different processes and we can tweak and improve them over time. And none of that is possible when you’re just, you know, struggling to keep your head above water.
So I highly recommend that book. Definitely want to check it out. Automatic Customer by John Warrillow.
Chad Franzen: 06:15
Okay. Sounds good. Absolutely. The next one is a piece of software you mentioned. It’s going to be an AI tool.
Tell us a little bit more about that.
John Corcoran: 06:22
Yes. There are so many AI tools, ChatGPT and Claude and all these different ones out there. Microsoft’s come out with its own Google Gemini. You know, the one that I really like is one called Perplexity. If you haven’t tried it out, check it out.
We’ve been using the Pro feature for a while now, and I like to try and stump it with different questions that are just as specific as you can get. So, you know, when you Google something like it has to be pretty broad, you know, like, how do you, you know, how do you fix this widget or how do you, you know, whatever. Like how do you know, you’re researching a car, you know, they want to buy or you’re researching a place you want to go on vacation. You keep it kind of broad, right? Like with Perplexity, you can get very narrowly specific, you know, like I had an issue with a smart bulb that I’m plugging into a fixture and there’s a concrete wall that’s in the way from the hub.
Well, how can I get around that? I can put all those details in there and incredibly, it will respond back. It will do the research and then will respond back with a tailored response step by step, relevant to your specific situation. And so it’s just a bit mind-boggling, you know, but the other key point is that, you know, one of the problems with ChatGPT early on was that ChatGPT would hallucinate, which was a fancy word for it would just make stuff up. And you had no idea, you know, unless you researched it much further that it was making stuff up, and that was really bad because, you know, there were there were some news stories about companies that relied on these things, or even lawyers that relied on case law that was completely made up total, total fiction.
And they just didn’t even realize it or didn’t check it. And so that’s a real problem. Well, Perplexity has citations. So if it relies on a bunch of different sources coming in, you know, putting up, putting together an answer to the question that you asked, then you can drill down further. You can see the source that it came from.
And that is really a game changer. So it doesn’t hallucinate, at least in my experience. I haven’t seen it hallucinating, making up things completely out of whole cloth because it has to get them from particular places and because it has access to real time to the internet, which is one of the big challenges early on that ChatGPT didn’t have. I think it does now, but at least early on, it it’s its source. Its internet sources had been cut off a couple of years earlier.
So if something had changed in the interim, then you wouldn’t have the most topical and most up to date information.
Chad Franzen: 08:53
Yeah, I used it. My wife and I had been going to this like couples group meeting on Sunday nights, and it was pretty good. But then Sunday nights just became a little bit difficult for us. And there were various other reasons, and I didn’t know how to frame the text in a way that’s not going to offend the host. Too bad.
So I was perplexed. Write it and copy and paste it. Set it off. Worked out great.
John Corcoran: 09:13
Isn’t that amazing? That happened to me also. Where was it? I was texting someone and I wanted to state something in a delicate way. I didn’t want to offend them, but I also wanted to be forceful.
I wanted to kind of state my opinion, and I had already drafted a response. And then I just, you know, said to Perplexity here, here are the parameters. You know, you draft me a series of texts, you know, like 3 or 4. Keep them casual. And it’s amazing how the tone matches the tone of a text message.
You know, it’s not all formal or anything like that. And it was definitely better than what I had come up with when I drafted and perplexed.
Chad Franzen: 09:56
You can attach I think you can attach documents to it if necessary. You can.